The meeting was called to order at 9:00 a.m. in the
17th Floor Conference Room, Union Building, in Little
Rock. Minutes from the last meeting of the January
26, 2000, meeting were unanimously approved.

Report from the State Land Information Coordinator

Shelby Johnson explained that he had attended the ASPM
American Congress on Surveying and Mapping Conference
on March 22 to sit on a panel discussion for Arkansas
Surveying and Geospatial

Issues, along with Kit Carson from Arkansas Highway
& Transportation Department, Ivan Hoffman, President
of the Arkansas Society of Professional Surveyors and
Charlie Storey from the U.S. Forest Service. He
said the discussion went well, and pointed out that
some other presenters at the conference included Mike
Mitchell, representatives from Intergraph and ESRI,
and that the major vendors were there.

Project Main

Shelby Johnson said that this project is finally underway
and that he has been planning this for about eight months.
He explained that MAIN stands for Mapping Arkansas'
Information Network and that it involves EAST program
participants mapping government facility locations statewide.
The primary purpose is to assist the Department of Information
Systems, as the supplier of public network service in
the state, to utilize this as a resource tool for planning
growth of the public network. The project is just
underway, with 58 high schools participating.

Shelby explained that in conjunction with the project,
he had had the opportunity to meeting with Arkansas
One Call and that they are very interested in the work
of the Board. He recommended that the Board should
consider including a One Call representative in the
membership of the proposed Board advisory committee,
as they are major users of GIS across the state.

He commented that he continues to make presentations
at meetings and functions and that he talks about the
Land Information Board and that this is ongoing.

GIS Audit

Shelby Johnson explained that the audit is moving forward
and the development is going well. There will
be a web-based audit and a mailing will be done in the
next several weeks. The results will be compiled
in a database for analysis of GIS resources in the state.
This information will also serve to support legislation
in the next session. He explained that this is
a replica of the FGDC survey that was done in 1996,
with the inclusion of addressing flood plain information.

American Congress of Survey and Mapping
Conference Report

Randy Jones reported that the attendance was good and
that the meeting was a success. He said that the
exhibit hall was nice and that all the major vendors
were represented. Shelby attended and participated
on a panel on Arkansas issues. He discussed the
Land Information Board and some of its goals.
Shelby explained that he was unable to attend any of
the other presentations. He went on to comment
that he did learn that the Arkansas Highway and Transportation
Department is putting up some new CORE (continuously
operating reference) stations and one will be in Monticello,
which he believes it will be available to the public.
This is a GPS base station that broadcasts its corrected
signal on an FM frequency, allowing public use of the
signal at no cost.

GTI Planning

Susan Cromwell explained that the director of DIS has
decided to not request Nortel's services for creating
a network services architecture as the resources to
develop that architecture already exists with the Land
Information Board, Project Main, and DIS Engineering.
Work that has been done in the Nortel sessions with
all the communities of interest has resulted in a lot
of valuable collaboration and identification of issues
and this information needs to be delivered to the DIS
engineers. The LIB next should try to wrap up
its strategic plan together with some technical emphasis
around the impact on bandwidth and the state network.

Old Business

Suzanne Wiley next brought up the subject of the LIB
web page and made suggestions regarding possible changes
to improve information presentation. Members were
invited to submit anything that they would like to see
used to augment the current web pages.

Arkansas Digital Ortho Photography Program

Shelby Johnson talked about the status of the color
infrared photography project. He explained that
the project is being handled in three phases:

The funding for Phase One was promised and secured
from the Governor's Office to DIS. Next was the
start of a fund raising effort to bring in cooperators
in state agencies, federal agencies and the private
sector, and to seek a grant from the Arkansas Economic
Development Fund Commission. The grant application
was to seek funding to cover the entire balance of the
project, all three phases, plus the Geostore operational
startup costs plus staffing for the office, for a total
of $4.1 million. Supporting funds were sought
from other sources and listed in the grant proposal
as a demonstration that it is a valuable project, it
is statewide, and it does impact the bottom line on
the state's ability to bring in industry and commerce,
as the grant fund's specific role is for job creation.

On March 8, Suzanne Wiley and Shelby Johnson, along
with Alan McVey, Deputy Director of ADED, made the presentation
for the grant fund. $100,000 was awarded from
that grant fund to apply towards the project.
The Phase One request was for $779,000, which would
have covered the balance of processing on the statewide
one-meter flight. To date, over $250,000 has been
raised from private sector companies, such as Weyerhauser,
International Paper, the Ross Foundation, etc.
A few county judges are also participating in covering
some funding, and the Corps of Engineers is contributing
$50,000 to the statewide one-meter processing.
All of this funding applies only to the statewide one-meter
phase. To date, the project is $500,000 to $600,000
short of covering all the processing costs for Phase
Two.

The contract with the vendor is that payment terms
are stretched out so that some of the funding may run
into the next fiscal year. At this point, though,
funding is not an issue as it stands at this time.

Suzanne Wiley added that the Economic Development Commission
Fund did invite the LIB back in September to look more
closely at the project. She commented that what
the LIB wanted to do was not a normal type of project
that are ordinarily presented to the Commission and
a couple of the members considered this project to be
too complicated, but that several members were very
supportive. She feels there is a good chance to
obtain more funding with better preparation. Shelby
explained that the Commission has requested more material
to explain what the LIB is and who the members are.
He is working on compiling information for this purpose
and has an outline for putting this information together
for the meeting with the Commission in the fall.

Shelby expressed his thanks to Mike Mitchell for assisting
with the meeting with forestry industry representatives,
which is where the majority of private sector funding
was obtained. A funding request was also presented
to Arkansas One Call, who is interested but noncommittal.

Shelby next showed the members a map of the state showing
areas that have already been photographed, and he explained
the flight procedures. He explained that the weather
has been a major problem and there have been only six
good weather days for flying over a six-week period
of time, and this has resulted in only 40 percent flight
coverage as of this meeting. Another limiting
factor is the NAPP specification of a 30 degree sun
angle to eliminate shadows, which means that no photography
can be done in the early morning or late afternoon.
Another limiting factor was the statewide snowfall in
January which totally prohibited photography based on
NAPP specs. Shelby explained that the trees are
leafing out and this raises questions as to whether
to continue photography with leaf on, particularly in
relation to major funding by the forestry industries,
who requested leaf-on photography from the start.
He pointed out that it is the decision of the Board
whether to continuing the flight into the leaf-on season.
This will result in a mismatch in some of the data in
that some areas will have leaves and others will not.

Shelby explained that Phase Two consists of the data
processing, and the data will be delivered in a compressed
format. Phase Three was to consist of sections
of high resolution photography in certain municipal
areas, but he was initially forced to pull that phase
due to lack of funding. However, the Corps of
Engineers is going to fully fund high resolution photography
for a mile and a half on either side of the Arkansas
River from the Oklahoma border to the Mississippi border.
This will be one-foot color and LIDAR high resolution
photography and will include several city boundaries.
The data provided from this phase will be available
for public access. Shelby made the suggestion
that a letter be sent to the Corps of Engineers thanking
them for their support of this phase of the project.

Shelby pointed out that with the exception of the Game
and Fish Commission and DIS, no other state agencies
have elected to participate in the project at this time.
He explained that with the end of the fiscal year, there
may be some more state agencies who will have funds
to use and they may choose to participate. He
added that no federal agencies have chosen to participate
at this point in time.

In conclusion, Shelby explained that if the flight
was continued in areas where people have cooperated
in funding efforts, at the very least none of the cooperators
will be disappointed in what is accomplished.

Society of Professional Surveyors

Randy Jones explained that the legislative committee
for the Arkansas Society of Professional Surveyors met
and are looking for projects for the next legislative
session. Ted Mullinex, a consultant, is going
to be working on these projects to prepare a funding
request for this project. One project is Act 645,
the filing act for surveyors requiring all surveyed
plats to be filed in the county and in the office of
the State Land Surveyor. What the ASPS wants to
do is have a web-based filing structure, eliminate the
requirements for filing in the counties, and do it at
a statewide level over the internet. This would
be administered by the State Land Surveyor, who is supportive
of the idea. There would be filing fees for filing
plats through the Land Surveyor's office and possibly
the LIB and DIS could have a portion of the fees for
administration of the process. Randy proposed
that DIS be approached to see if they would be interested
and if they are not, then an outside consultant be sought
to operate it. The timeframe is for this project
would be the summer of 2000. Susan Cromwell that
this would be a great opportunity as a digital signature
pilot project for the state. Suzanne Wiley pointed
out that there also will be privacy issues in regards
to this project and other GIS projects of this type.

Susan Cromwell made a motion that Randy Jones establish
a relationship with the Society of Professional Surveyors'
legislative committee to allow the LIB to provide support
and guidance towards the development of a web-based
survey filing system. Phyllis Smith seconded the
motion and it was approved unanimously by the members.

Steering Committee

The members discussed further the topic of potential
members for an LIB steering committee, and then table
this topic for the next meeting.

Committee Reports

Suzanne Wiley stressed that the Legislative Committee
really needs to get going, and that the Audit and Inventory
Committee is progressing well. There was discussion
and suggestions about where the Funding Committee could
be looking for grants and grant deadlines for funding
to help support LIB projects.

Suzanne suggested that the members continue work on
strategic planning as it would be good to have a plan
completed for the legislative package and to present
to the Economic Development Fund members.

Action Items

Continuing CIR Project

Legislative Planning for 2001 Session

Progress from LIB Subcommittees

Follow Legislation Being Developed by State Surveyors

Next Meeting

The next meeting date was projected for April 19
or 26, 9 - 12 p.m., and will be decided later.